Thursday 23 February 2017

in the news: Sinchew Daily

A reporter from a local newspaper Sinchew Daily, Tsae Jeng, contacted me mid January. She was working on an article about boardgames, and was interested to experience firsthand the boardgame hobby. We arranged an interview session, which eventually turned out to be 90% boardgame session and 10% interview session. It was casual and relaxed. We played four different games, all with three players. I am excited about being in the papers. I am also glad that boardgames is getting exposure in the mainstream media. I feel I'm doing my little bit in promoting the hobby.

I had shortlisted quite a few games for Tsae Jeng to pick. Of the four we eventually played, three were cooperative games - Pandemic, Hanabi and Escape: The Curse of the Temple. The fourth game was the ever popular Love Letter. So we've played both boardgame and card game; we've played a real-time game (Escape); we've played a weird game where you hold you cards backwards (Hanabi); we've played a microgame with only 16 cards (Love Letter). I say that's pretty good variety and a decent introduction to the hobby.

The article was published on 14 Feb 2017 (Valentine's Day!). For those who read Chinese, you can click on the photos below to read the article. The first one below is the introduction. Not surprising that an image such as this was used. Most people automatically think of Monopoly when they hear "boardgames".

One strange thing about Malaysian Chinese newspapers is they contain a mix of Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese, even within the same article. The titles and headings are Traditional Chinese, but the content is Simplified Chinese.

This next photo is the full view of the article. The font is small, so if you want to read the content, click the next few images, which are the zoomed in shots of the 5 different sections.

The copy of Love Letter I have at home is a self-made version using the Adventure Time theme, so I asked Tsae Jeng to go find an image of the original.

2 comments:

Aik Yong said...

haha, finally article out. traditional chinese characters are good for headlines, more hoity toity.

alas, even simple chinese characters are difficult for me, even when young I prefer english. so reading chinese takes awhile. If whole article the traditional chinese i maybe even KO.

But its quite standard article, they even wrote about your Witch House experience in Taiwan.

Hiew Chok Sien 邱卓成 said...

The reporter used to study in Taiwan, and apparently Witch House is quite well known there, not just for boardgames. So I guess it was something that resonated with her. Boardgames seem to be quite popular there. She had friends playing boardgames, just that she herself was never interested enough to join them.